


zeh el zeh sholchim manot

by Chestnut_filly



Series: Actual Fic [18]
Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Background Relationships, Baking, Collection: Purimgifts Extras, Gen, Human Disaster Anakin Skywalker, Humor, Jewish Holidays, Jews In Space, POV Ahsoka Tano, Timeline What Timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-17 05:36:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29712444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chestnut_filly/pseuds/Chestnut_filly
Summary: It was not precisely unusual to find Anakin’s chambers full of smoke of an afternoon, but the smoke didn’t usually smell so… toasty.
Relationships: Anakin Skywalker & Ahsoka Tano
Series: Actual Fic [18]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/935439
Comments: 6
Kudos: 14
Collections: All Your Faves Are Jewish, Purimgifts 2021





	zeh el zeh sholchim manot

**Author's Note:**

  * For [xslytherclawx](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xslytherclawx/gifts).



> Chag Purim sameach, xslytherclawx! I hope you enjoy Anakin failing at everything and Ahsoka laughing at him. Seasonally appropriate mockery ftw. 
> 
> Warning for the violence-averse: there is one offhand mention of a fictional usurper getting impaled on a stake a la Haman (boo).

It was not precisely unusual to find Anakin’s chambers full of smoke of an afternoon, but the smoke didn’t usually smell so… toasty. 

Ahsoka took a cautious step inside, wrinkling her nose. Had the extremely expired self-heating ration packs in the natural disaster kit finally exploded? Had Anakin been trying to feed a droid grain for some reason, and set it on fire? Had a fruiting Zelosian youngling snuck in and burned themself to a crisp on all the exposed electronics? 

The smoke and a torrent of muffled swearing was coming from the corner with the contraband food synthesizer. Anakin, it seemed, was hanging halfway out his window, hacking his lungs out. Ahsoka spared a moment to be grateful that no younglings had been harmed in the making of this minor fiasco. 

“What did you do this time, Skyguy?” 

Anakin flailed a bit, yanked himself back through the window, and rasped out something percussive that might have been her name. 

Ahsoka, with the ease of long practice, ignored him and went to poke at the synthesizer. The cereal-smelling smoke seemed to be dissipating, but some kind of bubbling gunk was still carbonizing itself to the heating element as she watched. It took some digging, but she located the bag of fire retardant under a pile of what looked like prototype data chips and, ignoring Anakin’s croaks of dismay, dumped it over the synthesizer. The whole mess hissed satisfyingly and ceased to belch fumes. 

“You know, you could always just get Dex to make you a sandwich,” she told him. He could have taken her with him! Dex was willing to serve her burgers with the patty almost raw -- and if she had come along, Obi-Wan would have absolutely come with them, and he always paid! She felt miffed. 

“It wasn’t a sandwich,” Anakin rasped. “It was for, uh, Senator Amidala.” 

Ahsoka had the best kind of bad feeling about this. 

“Does Senator Amidala have a scholarly interest in biochar that I didn’t know about?” 

Anakin glared and drew a breath to --Ahsoka could only imagine-- try to tell her off without letting on about his incredibly obvious secret romance, only to be overwhelmed by a last hacking bout of coughing. 

“Naboo-- cultural-- pastry-- pocket-- ear--” was about what Ahsoka managed to glean from that particular attempt.

“Did you stuff a bunch of culturally appropriated ears in your food synth to try to impress Senator Amidala?” she asked incredulously. 

“No!” Anakin retorted, banging his fist on his chest. He straightened up and crossed his arms, but Ahsoka crossed hers right back. Whatever this story was, it would get her smuggled chocolate in the Padawans’ mess for weeks if she told it right. 

“It’s a holiday,” Anakin said, clearly making his best effort at an echo of Obi-Wan’s cosmopolitan tones, “On Naboo. To celebrate the deposing of a particularly bad _vizier_ from a few thousand years ago and the reinstatement of the ruling queen. It is traditional to bring gifts of symbolic grain and fruit pastries to your friends.” 

“And you decided that going to the Chancellor’s favorite Naboo bakery literally one level below the Temple was too hard, and decided to, what, try to program it from the ground up in a half-disassembled food synth?” 

Anakin opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again. “I thought it would be more symbolically appropriate,” he said at last. 

Ahsoka thought she was doing a fantastic job keeping a straight face, and any tightness in her voice could be blamed on the lingering haze of smoke. “Symbolically appropriate,” she said, in a very normal pitch. 

“ _Symbolically appropriate,_ Snips!” Anakin snapped. 

Laughter won the battle. Ahsoka doubled over, wheezing. Anakin stomped over to deal with the mess of retardant powder and ash on the tabletop.

“What… do they symbolize?” she managed. 

Anakin looked shifty. “Um, it’s kind of a complicated story. They’re named after his pockets, but also they make fun of this guy’s hat? Kind of spiteful for the Naboo! But, uh-” 

“You don’t actually know, do you.”

“Every news site had three different opinions on it, Snips! I’m not a research Jedi!” 

Ahsoka caught her breath. Forget weeks, this would get her free chocolate for a _month,_ if they stayed on Coruscant that long.

“Do you at least know what they did with the guy?” she asked hopefully. On Shili, they had a story kind of like this where the usurper was impaled on a spike. 

“He went through a community-led truth-and-reconciliation process aimed at transformative justice and became an aquatic landscape designer,” Anakin replied. 

There was a beat. “You know the Naboo.” 

Ahsoka did indeed know the Naboo. Sometimes she wondered how they had ever produced Padmé. 

“Well, Skyguy,” she said, “Since I am totally sure you were going to bring these symbolic friendship hat pastries to the Chancellor and all the rest of the Naboo senatorial delegation as well as Senator Amidala, we had better get going to that bakery before they sell out.” 

“The Chance-- yes, right, definitely also the Chancellor, of course,” Anakin said. “Wow, that's a whole lot of pastries! That’s friendship.”

“That’s friendship!” Ahsoka chirped. She decided to be helpful, and brushed the last of the fire retardant into the waste collector. “I’ll come with you! Hey, after we drop off the cookies, we could go to Dex’s; it’s totally on the way back!”

Anakin laughed. “Let me go round up a speeder, Snips. If you can convince Obi-Wan to come, we can go to Dex’s afterwards.” 

“Friendship!” Ahsoka trilled, and went to bribe Obi-Wan into at least two extremely rare nerf burgers with the promise of the explanation for Anakin’s lingering whiff of Quinto grain charcoal.


End file.
